A charming and colorful dark theme for Xcode 🌈.
I love Dark Mode. And code-editing themes are no exception. But I've always found the colors used by most dark themes to be downright ugly — stale, muddy, conflicting, and ultimately failing to take advantage of their shadier surroundings.
So the idea behind Charmed Dark
is to create a palette of bright, charming, juicy primary colors that pop from a dark background, please the eye, but still don't overwhelm and still play nicely with each other.
I hope you like it — but feel free to tweak things as needed ✌️.
Tip
Depending on your monitor settings, GitHub's image resolution capabilities, and, likely, my own screen capturing limitations, these images might not be showing in their "true" resolution. Try following the installation instructions below and booting up a new Xcode project so see things for yourself.
- Fira Code
- 15 pt
- Retina/Medium/Bold
- Relaxed Line Spacing
- SF Pro Text
- 15 pt
- Medium/Bold
- SF Mono
- Regular
- 13 pt
If you haven't already done so, create a FontAndColorThemes
directory inside of Xcode's UserData
folder:
mkdir -p ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes
Then simply download this project and copy the Charmed Dark.xccolortheme file to the FontAndColorThemes
directory:
cp Charmed\ Dark.xccolortheme ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes/
From there, open up Xcode and head into Preferences
> Themes
, and select Charmed Dark
from the list of theme options. (If you currently have Xcode open, you'll likely need to restart it before seeing Charmed Dark appear in the menu).
Despite the previous jab I made at most dark themes, Charmed Dark
was inspired by some notable outliers — particularly One Dark and the outstanding Dracula theme. I use Dracula as my theme for iTerm, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it 🧛.